1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system. In particular, the present invention provides a method and apparatus for displaying discovered objects to the user. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method, apparatus and computer instructions for adaptively scaling a user interface to an object discovery/display system with policy-driven filtering.
2. Description of Related Art
With the increasing use of mobile devices, such as cellular phones, pagers, laptop computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), communications between users of these devices also increase. Communications are made to exchange information, such as, for example, emails, instant messages, images, and files. Conventionally, when a user wants to communicate with one another through the use of a mobile device, the user first tries to connect to a peer discovery system, which discovers all mobile devices that are within the range of a certain bandwidth. Common wireless communication protocols, such as bluetooth or wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi), are generally used for connecting these mobile devices. Bluetooth is a standard protocol, available from bluetooth SIG, for short-range radio links between devices. Bluetooth replaces links currently supported by many cables. Wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) is a networking technology that uses IEEE 802.11a or IEEE 802.11b standard to provide fast, secure and reliable wireless connectivity. A peer-to-peer environment may use the above technologies to share information between devices or share an Internet connection.
When the mobile device is connected to the peer discovery system, available peers, meaning other mobile device users, are displayed in a user interface to allow the user to interact with the user's peers. However, as the number of available peers or discovered objects becomes large, it becomes difficult and unwieldy for the user to look through the large number of available peers for one with which to interact. This difficulty is magnified by the small displays that are available on most mobile devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. Thus the issue of how to filter discovered objects in order to adequately display to the user becomes a problem.
Currently, existing object discovery or display systems often filter discovered objects using built-in rules, which the user has no control over. In addition, existing systems follow a pre-set order of filtering, where one rule follows another immediately without considering the dynamic nature of discovered objects.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method, apparatus and computer instructions for scaling a user interface to an object discovery or display system with policy-driven filtering that allows users to define filtering rules and dynamically applies filters to discovered objects as appropriate.